Entertainment

HOW TO: Survive a Social Media Revolt

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow him on Twitter

It often stuns me to see how poor social media entrepreneurs and their executives are at listening to their communities, communicating with them, and generally using the communities' feedback to improve their services. A quick glance at the top three sites in three of the fastest growing sectors within social media will exemplify this point.

There have been numerous 'revolts' on Digg (social news), hundreds of thousands of users have created numerous groups to stage protests on Facebook (social networking), and hundreds of blog posts have been written about how terrible Twitter's service and up-time used to be and what a poor job they were doing in communicating their problems with even their most loyal users (microblogging).

The Hulu Crisis

Keeping that in mind, it came as no surprise that when FX requested that Hulu remove an earlier season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia from the site, Hulu complied and removed the seasons in question without communicating the change to any community members. Seeing as "Sunny" is one of the most popular shows on the site, the community was rightfully upset and in quite an uproar at Hulu's mismanagement of the situation.

User Communication

What was surprising about this instance, however, was how exceptionally well Hulu responded to the uproar and handled their obvious mistake. Here's the letter Jason Kilar wrote to the community:

On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.'' We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu's opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we've added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well.

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia'' were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ''Sunny'' episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I'd like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case - FX Networks - was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it's not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Sincerely,

Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu

The Hulu team's initial mistake and Jason Kilar's subsequent response memo present many lessons for all social media entrepreneurs (and their executives).

Lesson #1: Communicate Even If You Have Nothing to Say

It baffles me to see that most of the people running popular social media sites (and new media sites in general) hardly communicate with their communities. When they do, it's usually for one of two reasons, either an announcement of new features (which is useful for PR purposes), or to apologize for their mistakes (these apologies usually come after massive uproar, not in the absence of). Write to your community and participate in your community even if you don't have something ground breaking to say, and definitely communicate with your community if you're going to be making changes that will effect thousands of loyal users.

The most loyal in your community will either understand your decisions, and if they don't, it will at least start a conversation that can result in the optimal solution for everyone. Kilar is very straightforward in stating that though his team is clearly responsible for mishandling the situation, the removed and temporarily reinstated episodes will ultimately have to go - even though Hulu doesn't want them to - because it was the content owner that requested the removal of the episodes.

Lesson #3: Make It Clear That You're Listening

As important as it is to communicate to your community, it is equally important to listen to what they have to say. And if you're listening to them, make it clear that you're listening, absorbing, and acting based on the feedback. Though it took a disastrous situation like this, Kilar makes it clear that the community has his ear and that his team is reading every email, every blog post, and every twitter message posted.

Lesson #4: Acknowledge Your Mistakes

When you make a mistake, rather than hiding in a bunker and waiting for the backlash to go away, or worse, trying to fight the backlash, it's always best to come out and admit that you made a mistake. After all, the customer is always right (especially if there are millions of customers, all in agreement, they must be right), and Kilar knows that and agrees that the feedback from the Hulu community was 'very reasonable'.

The best thing Kilar did, was to issue a rare (for the industry) and incredibly refreshing apology where he admits to screwing up royally in how the Hulu team handled the situation. Not just that, he goes on to acknowledge that he understands completely, exactly what the mistake was, what a better course of action would have been, and makes a point to state that the company knows its users deserve better.

Lesson #5: Promise to Learn and Improve - Then Deliver

The only thing worse than making a mistake is repeating it. And yet, we see companies apologizing for the same mistake again and again, promising each time that they will learn, improve, and grow with their community. Unlike other companies, Hulu was quick to reach out to FX, reinstate the missing episodes and re-handle the situation like it should have been handled to begin with. This time, all the episodes are up for access, there is a clear removal date, and the community knows about the date well in advance and is aware of the reasons why the episodes will have to go.

Conclusion

It is obvious, in retrospect, had Hulu been clearer about their relationship with various studios and the limitations on content availability, and been proactive about informing users of expiring content, this whole situation could've been avoided. However, the lessons to be learned here are immensely important and it would be a severe injustice to yourself as an entrepreneur, your community, and your investors, if you don't learn from Hulu's mistake and Kilar's response memo.

That said, one can't help but wonder what FX was thinking either. It is abundantly clear to any content creator (or owner) that we are living in the world of rampant piracy and that any content that is not available on demand, will be stolen at will (as wrong and illegal as that might be, it's also a fact).

In fact, Hulu was conceived to compete with this exact landscape in mind and to provide a legal, and free (commercial-supported) alternative to piracy. With that in mind, you have to wonder why FX would request to have the content removed. Hulu is, after all, a joint venture between NBC and News Corp. (which is the parent company that owns FX).

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